war songs
by all those friendly people
Summary: This is war, he realizes. This is war; war in all its angry shades of broken colors, war with its symphonies of screams and ringing steel upon steel and murder caked under his fingernails. -loki; very dark content.


a/n: covers very dark material, including but not limited to: rape, torture, abuse, etc. i do not romanticize any of this. this is the gritty truth.

loki/fury interaction is quoted from "the avengers" movie. i do not own the words they use in their exchange.

idea from lady charity's avengers fic /syrgja/. check it out, if you have time. it's really good.

* * *

::war songs::

* * *

::grief songs

He's falling, dropping; that heartbreaking, glass-shattering moment in which the entire universe is laid out before him in all its dazzling expanses, and all he can do is gaze at his (not) brother and try to form words with his traitorous lips. Instead, nothing comes out, only soundless whispers, and his father stares at him from his perch atop the Bifrost, looking wounded (like a proud lion), and Thor tells him, screams at him, _no no no loki don't do it don't let go brother loki STOP_

_NO_

(everything i did, i did it for you, why won't you understand)

He lets go and his (not) brother screams as he tumbles down down down down

* * *

::waking songs

Blackness and cold all around him, swirling like liquid smoke, sinuous black serpents that bite at his cheeks and ears and eyes and nose, at his tongue and his legs and his arms; they dart back and forth and reload their foul poison, they sink their fangs into his skin, they surround him, they are his world now.

Inhuman grunts, crude words, vowels in an alien language. Rough hands that drag him callously, carelessly, deeper into the fathomless abyss, and there are lizards, wolves, bats and dragons, sea monsters swimming through these ocean depths

(no no no no no stop help stop no no no NO NO)

Desperately, vainly, he claws at the ground and bloodies his nails and his fingers rip themselves to pieces against the unforgiving terrain (he feels shards of scattered bone) and hot tears pour down his cheeks, the only warmth in this winterland, there is nothing here but his heart hammering in his chest, and for once, in millennia, he is frightened, truly frightened, for himself.

He thinks, _I am Loki, I am Silvertongue, Father of Lies, I am a prince and a king and a god._

He clutches onto these dreams with his cracked hands as they pull him farther in, holding them to his stomach like gems and gold and precious things and fire and heat and light. His breath is ragged, his body flayed and bleeding, but still, he clutches, he thrusts his fists against this infernal prisons and demands release.

(in time, even these things dim, eclipsed by the gravity of the night)

* * *

::misery songs

He has lost track of the years. Numbers slip through the sieve of his brain and clatter on down, out of his pores and onto the ice, where they freeze and become brittle like so many men caught in a Jotunn frost. _It is so cold_, he observes. _It is so cold_.

(the winter here burns with a passion, burns with a desire)

The Chitauri are blue-skinned, broad-limbed; they spit through the bars of his cell, they curse his name, they fill his head with so many repugnant words that he can feel himself rotting from the inside out. His whole body buzzes and fills with contagion, his mind is blurred with so many roaring fevers (they quiet the noise), and still, he shivers and shakes uncontrollably, it is so cold, so very cold.

"Hungry?" they jeer, and they force their feces through his mouth, feces and urine and scraps of some unidentifiable meat reeking with decay, and tough bread (his mouth is bleeding) and they laugh and they shove him outside, bare, without any rags to wear, and they scowl and they sneer and he curls up into a ball, tries to block them out, tries to block out the cold and the heat and the bruises that discolor his flesh as blue-black as theirs.

"I've got something for those lips of yours, _Silvertongue_," one of them snarls, and he forces his way into Loki's mouth, thick and bulging and bitter, while another grabs him from behind and forces himself in through _there_, and he cannot scream because he is screaming into empty air and stinking crotch and the Chitauri spectators watch and chortle and cheer as they thrust into him, both of them, and he cries and shouts and begs to die, because nothing could be worse than this.

(they revise his opinion of worse over and over again, so much that he feels he understands what pain is, now; true pain, agony to the deepest degree, anguish so acute, so visceral that it cuts through him like a thousand swords impaled through his torso)

They sew up his mouth and rip the stiches free. They cut him out of his skin, boil it in saltwater and excrement, and force him to put it back on. They blind him, they mute them, they deafen him, they rip out his fingernails one by one, they yank out fistfuls of his hair, they break all of his bones with painstaking slowness, they fill him with pestilence and give him a crown of briars and thorns to wear upon his head and a throne of carrion to sit upon.

"All hail the king!" they cry, and they fall over laughing and he simply sits, unmoving, until they drag him from his pedestal again and beat their words into him, turn him into a king of the damned.

He weeps, he begs, they throw him back into the cell and let him wallow in his own blood.

He has no tears left.

* * *

::treaty songs

They take him to the court of their master, the great Other.

He feels the power once he steps in; a foul, nauseous stench, corpse-crows that flock to the ceiling and stare down at the proceedings with their beady pupils, black miasma and smoke and a palpable thrum of archaic powers, condensed, coalesced into a single body.

Thanos, He Who Courts Death.

A rumbling voice like mountains being crushed underfoot.

"You've been here for quite a long time," Thanos says, his voice inexplicably delicate. He reaches out and taps Loki on the head with a finger, the gesture somehow affectionate like an owner and a dog, and in that brief contact stars collapse and planets implode and Loki is left feeling hollow and turned inside out.

(it's a burning sort of cold)

"I think I can make some use of you, prisoner." Thanos' pale blue lips curve upwards into a smirk, a smirk that could kill and lay waste to civilizations if it wanted. "You wish to leave, do you not? You wish to live again."

He bends down, close enough that Loki can see Thanos' eyes and they are the blackest shade he has ever seen; they envelop him, they swallow him, they make him forget who he is for a split second.

Thanos whispers, "I can do this for you. But first, you must promise me these things."

They negotiate. His manacles come off, flaking rust and shit and his dried blood.

He walks out, a legion of unearthly soliders in tow, takes his first step off the stygian plane for the first time in aeons-

-and finds himself in this metal room, and these men and women gazing at him, awestruck, terrified, spellbound.

He lifts a hand, and they are all in his thrall (weak creatures that they are), and he smiles without mirth and laughs without humor.

(in the blink of an eye, time becomes dust falling through the gaps in that broken hourglass)

* * *

::hunger songs

It is so easy, surprisingly. After an eternity spent in dark isolation, the magic is still familiar to him, still rises at his beck and call, still dances across his fingertips with nimble grace. A nebula, no, a supernova of potential housed inside his heart, laying dormant, now awakens like some great slumbering mountaintop beast.

(he roars, the world hears)

Incantations, enchantments, murmured words and his visage transforms. His thralls are already working their way in; the archer stands poised, his receiver awaiting Loki's response.

Languidly, he strolls down the marble stairs, absently listening to the classical piece playing in the background. From his cloak he retrieves the device, finds his target, pins him against the altar like a sacrificial lamb, and plunges the tool into the man's eye, oblivious to his subject's agonized screams as it assimilates his ocular data, relays it to the archer, and unlocks the doors for the rest of his forces to enter. Suddenly, the patrons are running around like sheep without a herder, flocking to every possible exit only to have their escape deterred by the grim-faced sentinels in black stepping in, gliding across those gilded floors with the liquid flux of water; he watches.

The disguise melts from his form, and now he is clothed in his battle garb. The cane becomes a staff, the power of the Tesseract flows again, coursing through his veins like electricity. It is ecstatic, it enthralls, it mesmerizes.

"You were made to be ruled!" he cries, the sea of people subside with easy grace. He's bitter static, discharging stray volts from his flesh at random intervals, highlighted by a corona of power. "_I _am your ruler," he snarls. "_I _am your king, this world is mine for the taking."

"We will not be ruled by the likes of you!" A man shouts in response. Old and withered is he, bent and broken but still radiating defiance in waves. Loki takes only the briefest step back, the man roars, "_We will not be trampled by your kind_!"

It frightens him, it unnerves him, it makes him furious

(this is HIS kingdom, HIS throne)

and he gathers his fury into the palm of his hand. Blue fire, blue ice, blue water, blue wind. The elements diverged from the prism, summoned by his will, bent into his design. Seidr; it flows, it waxes and wanes, he is the sorcery he weaves and yes, there is power to be caught and it _sings_ to him a sweet serenade of desperation-

"Loki!"

He knows that voice, he would know it anywhere. Minutely, marginally, his eyes dilate, and he trembles.

Thor. Golden, fair-haired, proud Thor. Arrogance is his armor, he stares at Loki with something like sorrow and something like fear and something like pain, pins and needles through his stomach.

It makes him sick.

He waves a hand, and cars flip end over end, lightbulbs explode, telephone wires coil, serpentine, and lash out. His not-brother bats them away, the sky crackling with thunder. Ozone, strong and sharp, fills his nostrils. This is so familiar, so familiar that it hurts. His eyes sting as he screams and hisses and sends magic flying at Thor; Thor, who gazes at him like his not-father did, forlorn, wanting, so _petulant_ is this knight of Asgard. Thor is disgusting, Thor is wretched, Thor should die with a snap of his fingers but he _doesn't_, and it is infuriating.

His tongue mangles the words of power, his magic comes loose. There are more, now; his not-brother's comrades: a man in steel, a soldier dressed in red, white, and blue, and a woman firing at him from one of their pathetic earthly contraptions. She knows his name and tells him to _stop_

(like his brother did, like his father did, and he didn't)

so instead, he flings burning, blistering arrows at them, snarls guttural, incomprehensible words and builds barriers, draws so much magic into himself he fears he may shatter into a million glass fragments on the spot.

But he doesn't.

Instead, his not-brother weaves in through the shields as easily as a worm, those blue eyes so soft and (warm) greedy, and he says, "I'm sorry."

The hammer hits him soundly and he crashes into oblivion.

* * *

::interlude songs

These glass walls, they should break and bend as he speaks but they hold firm. Like Thor, they are unshakable, they aren't susceptible to the smooth flow of all things, the things that he warps to his liking.

A conundrum. He calculates coldly, stares at his reflection and recalls all those features he forgot:

snake eyes, snake nose, snake skin, snake lips.

ugly ugly ugly.

Runt. Weakling. Pitiful.

He rages against himself but it is futile; there is only the reflection mocking him and he cannot kill that.

Footsteps. A man with an eyepatch regards him through the walls of his cell. Observing. Stalwart. Loki grins and gets up.

"It's an impressive cage," he remarks, throwing his arms wide. "But not built, I think, for me."

The man (Fury) answers, "Built for something a lot stronger than you."

"Oh, I've heard." Dry amusement. He pivots, facing the camera that was so easy to find. Gazes into the red-haired woman's eyes.

"A mindless beast. Makes play he's still a man."

(she looks up. her colleague stands, arms crossed. tensed, like a string for a note.)

"How desperate are you?" he wonders. "You call on such lost creatures to defend you."

"How desperate am I?" Fury mutters.

One step forth. "You threaten my world with war."

Another. "You steal a force you can't hope to control."

A third. "You talk about peace and you kill 'cause it's fun."

They are eye-to-eye, now; Fury buzzes with a barely checked anger, his body pulsates with scarlet, with crimson.

"You have made me _very _desperate. You might not be glad that you did."

"Oh," he whispers. "It burns you to have come so close, to have attained the Tesseract, to have power." A pause. "_Unlimited_ power. And for what? A warm light for all mankind to share?" His lips curl roughly, cruelly; he knows their cameras are trained on him, that eyes and ears are hearing his words. He knows, and he revels in this.

(thor is hearing this, they are all hearing this, the maggots)

"And then to be reminded what _real_ power is."

Fury leaves with a parting jest, but he is not fooled. He perceives the man's disquiet as keenly as he maps out the individual grains comprising these transparent boundaries, this fool's barricade, this impermanent vessel.

Still grinning softly to himself, he sits down, tucks his legs under each other, and ponders.

* * *

::brother songs

Thor finds him in the cell, begging as he once did, pleading for water, for escape, for a brief withdrawal from this terrible, scorching _pain_.

He runs into the cell, through the doors, like a loyal dog. It's painfully hilarious, almost, when the doors close and he is left inside, hands pressed to those glass rings, eyes so impossibly bright.

"Loki," his not-brother breathes. "Loki, you don't have to do this-"

"What do you know of what I can and cannot do?" he inquires, quietly. His fingers trace patterns in the air, idle things that live and die in mere milliseconds. Glowing constructs flit around Thor's prison, tantalizing and teasingly out of reach. His not-brother gives a low exhalation of rage and despair.

"Loki, you have to come home, you have to stop this while you still can," Thor entreats him. "Please, brother."

"Don't call me that!" Loki snaps harshly, and the room shudders on its foundations. He inhales, soothes the tide. "Don't. Call. Me. That. You're no brother of mine." He presses his fingers against Thor's splayed ones. "I am a bastard son, you know this. We are not- you are _not _my _brother_."

His words come out too fast, too slippery. He wants to wound Thor; he can't. His not-brother sees through these thin walls of untruths, sees through them and watches them crumble. Has it been that long since they last met?

The pane fogs over with ice.

_Yes_, his mind whispers.

Thor shouts, he screams, _he _the prisoner now and Loki can only feel a strange, not-full bitter un-satisfaction as the cell drops down, miles and miles below, and in a flash of blonde and blue his not-brother is gone.

"Goodbye," he says, and leaves.

* * *

::battle songs

The portal from the world of the Chitauri to the earth is wide and black-purple-blue, nebulous in its entirety, huge shifting constellations of spatial material that rip at the seams of the sky like teeth. They stain the atmosphere, turn the white cumulus clouds grey-lined like the lungs of a smoker and the cerulean horizon pitch-black and distorted. Sulfur emanates, the sound of clanging spears and rifles, the Tesseract's soothing sonatas, they fill the suburban sprawl of New York with their own ominous orchestral compositions.

And they pour through the gaping maw in swarms, in droves and numbers too large for him to count even if he wanted to. The Chitauri, the aliens, they emerge in all their horror, plated with hard steel and bathed in the blue incandescence of the Tesseract's energy. The blue is too soft, too blunted; it does not fit the Chitauri at all. He looks at that blue and he thinks of icy tundras, jagged bars of iron, and Chitauri flesh and Chitauri teeth and the Other's rasping, lilting tone.

This is how the apocalypse begins. Starships, battleships, warships with Chitauri riders. Leviathan-like things, beast and machine, abominations of nature, perversions of Seidr. Humanity cowers on its knees. Fury sends his forces against the onslaught.

_Naive_, is what comes to mind.

His archer is among the ranks of their opponents, freed from Loki's control. Their eyes meet and Barton glares and Loki sets his lips into a firm line. He wills the magic again, calls it forth from the burbling oceans of his being.

It dances, it waltzes, it bursts into thunderous dirges with the mere coercion of his fingers. Magic, enhanced by the Tesseract's city-wide aura. The light pours, the gap widens, the heroes shrink back. The man of steel shoots his missiles, the man-monster is a rampage all of its own, the woman a leaping, whirling spider, the soldier batting aside _his_ Chitauri, _his_ men. He holds no love for these savages, but the heroes are a problem and they must be dealt with.

One of the archer's arrows crashes into his craft and he falls off, landing on Stark Tower's highest balcony. Muttered words, incantations recited by memory. Fires blossom and expand, the terrain shifts sublty but unmistakably; he schemes and plots his machinations, sets them into actions and gives them existence. His hands twist and contort, and rubble launches itself at his problems, debris whips into gyrating cyclones, all of it sits and waits for his next command.

The Other speaks into his mind, orders him to lead them, lead them into victory.

"Of course," he gasps, his body recoiling at the Other's voice. "Of course."

He staggers, retches and vomits bile, wipes it from his lips and, with bloodshot eyes and dark veins, sets his work anew, building armies from the dark and monsters from the deepest corners of man's imagination.

The world will be _his_, one way or another.

Laughing to himself.

* * *

::death songs

They come, they still persist in their folly. Earth's defenders, its mightiest heroes. He curses them all, spits on their graves, howls and raves, spewing ichor from his mouth.

(this is how a god bleeds, this is how a god ends)

Thor, still alive, crashes below him, a blaze of scarlet and silver. He turns, sees his not-brother, and scowls.

"Loki, stop the Tesseract or I _will _destroy it!" Thor roars (proud lion), and glowers up at Loki.

"Never," he hisses. "You can't stop what has begun. The world will _bow_-"

Bellowing, he leaps from his vantage point and brings the staff down. Tesseract power crackles against the might of Asgardian weaponry. Lightning against lightning. He swings the staff around, sending jettisons of energy streaking through the skyline. Thor swings, shatters brick and tile. The battle still rages.

"Come home, Loki," Thor pants, their weapons crossed. "Please."

"Don't you understand?" he snarls, eyes livid, trying to get his not-brother to _understand_. "I cannot. The Tesseract will not end. It will continue, and it will crack this mortal realm upon its very _axis_, and then I will claim the throne. I will rule." Breathless, breathless. "You cannot stop me."

His not-brother leaps towards the Tesseract's ray, but Loki brings him down with a gesture. A few more spells, and slashes run along his not-brother's armor. Cruel magic, unsympathetic magic. A wild gleam in his eyes, a strange exhilaration. Yes. He feels so powerful. Death is in his blood, Death fights for him, Death rises and swallows the world in its mouth.

"Loki-" Thor struggles, his mouth bloodied. He coughs it onto his hands and stares, as if he cannot quite believe what he is seeing.

"_Break_." Loki's teeth clench, and Thor gives an abrupt howl as his left leg jerks savagely to one side, the bones snapping impossibly so; the god screams.

"You are not my brother."

_Cut._

Blood from gashes leaks, Thor's face contorts into a mask of anguish.

"You are not of my blood."

_Pain._

Thor turns his head to the sky and cries to Odin.

"You will not say my name with those filthy lips any longer."

_Silence_.

Thor is rendered mute by the force, the compulsion behind the command. Desperately, he appeals to Loki one last time with his eyes, that calm cerulean that is so at odds with the color of Ragnarok (that pitch-black). His fingers reach, grasp onto Loki's cloak like a lifeline. He looks up, bloodstained and ragged, awaits benediction.

"_Die_."

Loki brings the spear down, down, down, downdowndown-

-it comes out sticky and red.

Thor's chest heaves, his body shivers, and he is no more.

(asgard mourns for its golden prince)

Stunned, Loki reaches down and touches the mark to see if it is real. His hands come away warm with his not-brother's life plastered onto his guilty fingers.

This is war, he realizes. This is war; war in all its angry shades of broken colors, war with its symphonies of screams and ringing steel upon steel and murder caked under his fingernails.

* * *

::funeral songs

It is easy after that.

(after he slays his brother)

All of them topple, one by one, like dominos. Fury is the final one, standing in the ruins of his ship, dead agents littered all around him. He's a king of corpses in a land of the dead, his jacket tattered, gazing at Loki with the same look Odin graced him with before he drowned in those pools of nothing.

His hand darts to his holster. Loki separates his limbs from his torso with a single syllable.

The Other arrives amid a fanfare of carnage. Trumpets bellow death-songs, the Chitauri sing an anthem of madness and he joins in, praising their leader as he walks through the streets, grinning, and crushes those fragile human bodies without batting an eye.

Thanos dedicates the earth to his bride, Death. Insidious midnight flows from the titan like a wildfire, catching every building, every last mote of dust and obliterating it completely. Ashes darker than space float from the remains, and New York is no more.

He stands next to the conqueror, placid save for his trembling knees. Asgard will attempt to interfere, as it must; Odin will be coming to lead the armies, but he is old and weak and he will fall like Fury did. The elves will snap like wood. The dwarfs will be trampled under the weight of this netherworld, this hideous nothingness that permeates the universe and leaves planets empty.

"You have done well," Thanos booms as he leads his procession of the dead throughout the city streets, and Loki stays behind at the tower, watches through the broken windows, tunes out the screaming and the misery. He mixes himself a drink and lounges on Stark's half-burned couch.

Unbidden tears slip down his cheeks, burning raw trails through his skin as they fall; he hums Chopin's Funeral March to himself and waits for the end of the world.

* * *

a/n: please do not favorite without reviewing! :) thank you.


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